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History and the Tea Party

Tea Party activists constantly invoke the past as the measure of their politics. We need to return to constitutional government, we need to revive the spirit of the American Revolution and, most obviously, these new conservatives invoke the example of the Boston Tea Party. Harvard Historian Jill Lepore writes, though, that this is totally misplaced and misunderstood history. She blames the activists but she also blames historians for refusing to engage with the public in recent decades to teach the real and much more complicated history of the American Revolution and the American Constitution.